“Some of you have asked why I’m spending so much time on lighting effects. As an independent developer who is now trying to do this full-time for a living, I’m painfully aware of the reality of indie games as a business. An indie needs to sell a full-price game direct to a customer every 45 minutes in order to have a career as a full-time indie. The average conversion rate of downloads to sales is about 1%, which means someone needs to be downloading my game demo every 27 seconds. That means I have to make my game really good. I’m competing for your money against thousands of other games, most of which are produced by larger companies with deeper pockets than mine. So I have to make my games better than they have been in the past, just to survive in this market.

One of the frequent criticisms that I receive about the first Dirk Dashing game is the graphics. Even though the game itself is fun, I’m painfully aware that the graphics in the first game are flat, and parts of the animation aren’t very smooth. I’m planning to address those issues in the sequel by making the animation smoother, applying cell-shading to the characters and objects, and doing more detailed backgrounds with lighting effects. Hopefully that will result in better screenshots that will convince more people to download the game and try it out.

By the way, I’m nowhere near selling games at the rate of 1 every 45 minutes. If I sell a dozen in one day, I’m doing exceptionally well. This is one of the reasons why I decided to risk going full-time (even though the business can’t sustain me yet), so that I could spend the necessary time to make my games better. I look at it as an investment.”